"This is certainly not the first case in which a merger approved in one place hasn't gone through in the other. There was a case last year where the merger between two EU companies was approved here and blocked in the U.S"
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Bureaucratic understatement is doing heavy lifting here. Monti, speaking as an EU competition czar steeped in transatlantic deal diplomacy, is normalizing friction that companies and politicians prefer to frame as scandal: approvals do not travel well. By calling it “certainly not the first case,” he drains the moment of melodrama and recasts it as routine structural reality. That’s not just calming language; it’s a strategic refusal to let any single merger become a proxy war over sovereignty.
The subtext is a quiet assertion of institutional parity. When he notes an earlier instance where the EU said yes and the U.S. said no, Monti is pre-empting the familiar narrative that Europe is the obstructionist and America the market-friendly grown-up. He’s reminding listeners that regulatory disagreement is symmetrical, and that neither side has a monopoly on “sound economics.” It’s also a subtle message to dealmakers: don’t treat Brussels as a stamp you collect on the way to Washington, or vice versa.
Context matters: cross-border mergers in the 2000s were becoming stress tests for globalization itself, forcing regulators to answer a political question in technical clothing: who gets to set the rules for corporate scale? Monti’s clipped comparison keeps the argument on procedural terrain while signaling something more consequential - that in an integrated economy, power still stops at borders, and the map is drawn by antitrust lawyers as much as by diplomats.
The subtext is a quiet assertion of institutional parity. When he notes an earlier instance where the EU said yes and the U.S. said no, Monti is pre-empting the familiar narrative that Europe is the obstructionist and America the market-friendly grown-up. He’s reminding listeners that regulatory disagreement is symmetrical, and that neither side has a monopoly on “sound economics.” It’s also a subtle message to dealmakers: don’t treat Brussels as a stamp you collect on the way to Washington, or vice versa.
Context matters: cross-border mergers in the 2000s were becoming stress tests for globalization itself, forcing regulators to answer a political question in technical clothing: who gets to set the rules for corporate scale? Monti’s clipped comparison keeps the argument on procedural terrain while signaling something more consequential - that in an integrated economy, power still stops at borders, and the map is drawn by antitrust lawyers as much as by diplomats.
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| Topic | Business |
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